William Fagg and the Study of African Art

14.00 – 18.00, Friday 24 April 2015 (with registration from 13.30) 09.30 – 17.30, Saturday 25 April 2015 (with registration from 09.00)

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAHIES

Professor John Mack (Professor of World Art Studies, UEA, Chairman of UEA’s Sainsbury Institute for Art)

John Mack is Professor of World Art Studies and Chairman of the Sainsbury Institute of Art at the University of East Anglia. He joined the British Museum/Museum of Mankind in 1976 eventually specialising in the collections from Central and Eastern Africa and the western Indian Ocean. He was Keeper of Ethnography from 1991 until 2004.

Professor John Picton (SOAS)

John Picton is Emeritus Professor of African Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, where he was employed from 1979 until 'retirement' in 2003. Before SOAS he worked for the British Museum Dept of Ethnography (Museum of Mankind) 1970-79, and the Nigerian government Department of Antiquities 1961-70.

Professor Philip Peek (Drew University) Benin City and Beyond: William Fagg and the 'Lower Niger Bronze Industry'

When William Fagg enthusiastically proposed the label of “Lower Niger Bronzes” for those Benin works he felt did not belong among the famous court busts and plaques, he could not have known how many copper-alloy objects would be added to this group. My research has revealed hundreds of works which have come to be called “Lower Niger Bronzes” including bell heads, leopard skulls, and humanoid figures. We are grateful to Fagg for highlighting this category but perhaps he separated too many works from the court corpus. I propose returning pieces such as “The Hunter” to the Benin court; but pursuing other works as products of several still unlocated “Lower Niger Bronze Industries.” Additionally, many of these exceptional works may pre-date the classic Benin court bronzes. Current research on a unique group of bell heads apparently related to the Osun religious complex in Benin City gives substance to such a claim.

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml

In addition to numerous articles on African expressive behaviour, especially visual and verbal arts and divination, publications include several edited volumes: African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing (1991), Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment in the Niger Delta (co-edited with Martha Anderson) (2002), African Folklore: An Encyclopedia (co-edited with Kwesi Yankah) (2004), Divination and Healing: Potent Vision (co-edited with Michael Winkelman) (2004), Twins in African Cultures: Double Trouble, Twice Blessed (2011), and Reviewing Reality: Dynamics of African Divination (2013) (co-edited with Walter van Beek).

Angela Rackham, (Independent Scholar) Revealing Sculptures: The Nok Terracottas in Time and Space.

A discussion of the evidence relating to the 'Nok Culture' of Nigeria. Past excavations and present research will be reviewed in an attempt to better understand those enigmatic pre-historic inhabitants of central Nigeria.

Angela Rackham worked as a government archaeologist in Nigerian Federal Department of Antiquities from 1967 to 1976. Currently she is working on archive material relating to the Nok Culture and the iron smelting traditions of Nigeria.

Professor Rowland Abiodun (John C. Newton Professor of the History of Art and Black Studies, Amherst College) William Fagg: A Visionary in African Art Studies.

Perhaps more than at any other moment in the history and study of African art, William Fagg’s prophetic statements challenge all Africanist art scholars and in particular, those already moving away from the study of ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-colonial’ art, so-called, for the new but still developing and uncharted field of ‘global’ art. Fagg’s observations force us to examine how much progress we have really made in the study of African art since his time. Could any lessons learned from the past be relevant today? For example, is the study of ‘meaning’, still as important today as Fagg affirmed in his work? He writes:

The study of meaning in African … art is at a rudimentary, not to say primitive, stage. Collectors have generally been content at most to record the overt content (such as ‘figure of a woman with two children’), or if they do more (“the earth goddess”) are often merely reproducing European conjectures. These, however, are still within the realm of subject-matter, whereas meaning or real subject is to be looked for within the realm of ideas, which are the province of philosophy. It is in this crucial field of tribal philosophy that our pilgrim in search of meaning in art finds himself face to face with a virtual desert, a dearth of knowledge … He continues: … [W]e should note that a philosopher equipped only with European philosophical systems will be of little use in filling the lacuna; … (1973: 161)

Rowland Abiodun is John C. Newton Professor of Art, the History of Art, and Black Studies at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (2014), What Follows Six Is More than Seven: Understanding African Art (1995); co-author of Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (1989), Yoruba Art and Aesthetics (1991), and Cloth Only Wears to Shreds: Yoruba Textiles and Photographs from the Beier Collection (2004); and co-editor of The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts (1994). Abiodun was a consultant for, and participant in, the Smithsonian World Film, Kindred Spirits: Contemporary Nigerian Art. A former member and chair of the Herskovits Book Award Committee of the African Studies Association, Abiodun has also served on the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association and as the President of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. He chaired the Executive Board of the Five College African Scholars Program, Amherst, Massachusetts, and has been interviewed by the BBC World Service on the Art of Africa. In 2011, he received the Leadership Award of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association in recognition of his excellence, innovative contributions, and vision in the fields of African and Diasporic Arts.

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Dr Charles Gore (SOAS) Commemorating William Fagg: Commemoration, Memory-Making and Benin Art.

William Fagg highlighted the royal court art of Benin as a means to challenge the then current notions of African art. This paper offers a revisionist account of Fagg's approach to Benin art by considering the wider range of artefacts made by brass casters. It proposes that much of it is ignored in favour of a particular canon that has maintained by narratives of expropriation, whether of British empire or postcolonial claims of repatriation. It argues that a royal hegemony over subaltern groupings was not reified by the royal arts in the palace, to which an elite had access, but achieved through the corporate role of brasscasters in performing and supplying these other artefacts used in funerary rites of Edo families. It is through these means that memorialisation and commemoration was achieved and linked to that of the reigning dynasty, enabling a dialectic relation between the king and the many differentiated communities over which he exercised authority.

Dr Charles Gore (SOAS) has carried out extensive research for 30 years at Benin City in Edo state working with practitioners of the local indigenous religion and with brasscasters; and also carried out research in Anambra state and other parts of southern Nigeria. He was the consultant for Artist Unknown (1995) a BBC film made about the arts of Benin City. He is currently researching on early histories of photography of Nigeria. and West Africa.

Dr Barbara Plankensteiner (Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Weltmuseum Wien) African Art and William Fagg's Contemporaries in Austria.

By looking at African art research in Vienna I try to situate William Fagg’s work until the 1970s in a larger framework of the scholarly discourse of his time. With a specific focus on Etta Becker-Donner (1911- 1975), Annemarie Schweeger-Hefel (1916-1991) and Herta Haselberger (1927 - 1974) and their specific research interests and approaches I will analyse how these three Austrian researchers influenced by German culture historical anthropology traditions studied African art from a different perspective. By coincidence in Austria this scholarly field was occupied by three ladies with different disciplinary background. Two records of connection and interaction will be the starting point for this unusual contextualization of Fagg’s oeuvre: a personally posted presentation copy of On the Nature of African Art to Becker-Donner and Fagg’s comments on a 1961 article of Haselberger on the Method of Studying Ethnological Art.

Barbara Plankensteiner is deputy director and chief curator at the Weltmuseum Wien, Austria, and lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. Her research centres on African material culture and art, collection history and museum representation. She was lead curator of the international exhibition Benin – Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria and editor of the accompanying book. She recently co-curated the exhibition African Lace. A History of Trade, Creativity and Fashion in Nigeria and co-edited the accompanying catalogue. Currently she is leading the European cooperation project SWICH,Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage. Ethnography, Museums of World Culture and New Citizenship in Europe.

Dr William Rea (University of Leeds) The Sculptors of Ekiti: The Context of Creativity.

Near the beginning of Baxandall’s Limewood carvers he states that “only very good works of art, the performances of exceptionally organised men, are complex and co-ordinated enough to register in their forms the kinds of cultural circumstances sought (here).” This paper argues that William Fagg was fortunate enough to witness and document the end of a rare episode of great artistic creation. This paper is based on the extraordinary woodcarving ability of artists in North-eastern Ekiti. Nigeria. William Fagg, Kevin Carroll and John Picton have all pointed to this area as specific within the canon of Yoruba woodcarving and a number of authors (Abiodun, Walker) have documented the individual styles and creative lives of some of the carvers.

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The art of this region, in proximate association to the major state systems of Oyo and Ife and on the margins of Yoruba identity, itself registers the particular circumstances of its making (and perhaps its decline). Beginning with the biography of the last remaining carver in the town of Ikole Ekiti, this paper, through the register of its forms, aims to understand the cultural circumstances within which the diversity of carving documented by Fagg flourished. It does so in relation to the distribution of cults in this region and to the specific ways in which Orisha, Imole and Ebora are made materially manifest. It places the work of art at the centre of a history of warfare, migration and resettlement within the Yoruba periphery. Understanding the changing circumstances that led to the production of these works might allow greater understanding of the historical processes of Yoruba ethnogenesis within this periphery, and its changing formulations; changes that at once allowed for the burgeoning of a tradition but which may ultimately have signalled its decline.

Dr Will Rea is senior lecturer in art history at the University of Leeds. Born in Ibadan (Omo n’ile Meji), his PhD was from the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, based on fieldwork conducted under the auspices of the Nigerian National Museums and Monuments Commission. His research is primarily concerned with the Ekiti Yoruba town of Ikole Ekiti, first visiting the town on the advice of John Picton in the early 1990s. His monograph on the Egigun masquerades of that town is nearing completion. This work, “No event, no history” documents the changing structures and performances of the various masquerades in that town over the past 100 years. He continues to visit Ekiti (where his wife, as Iyaibeji, is far more respected than he is) but has been more recently developing research on the creative and cultural industries in Lagos and Ibadan. He is the former chair of the Harlow Art Trust.

Professor Sidney Kasfir (Emory University, Atlanta) Awe, Resistance and Reassessment: William Fagg and the Benue.

The title refers to my own successive reactions to William Fagg’s almost oracular reputation at different stages of my own career from student to mature scholar. The paper then addresses the limits of the connoisseurship method in identifying African art objects in the absence of a known historical context. This was the problem William Fagg faced when he sought to assign provenance outside his familiar territory of southwestern Nigeria. In the 1960s and early 70s when he was establishing himself as the most authoritative voice in the formation of an African art canon, he and his contemporaries relied primarily on what we later called artistic geographies. This template, for which Fagg himself coined the term “tribality,” was based in a spatial conception of African art styles, but largely set aside the importance of historical change, with the exception of his work on Benin court art. I will use the example of late nineteenth century maternity figures in the Lower Benue region to illustrate the limitations of ignoring major historical events such as the Fulani Jihad and the arrival of the British, one following the other in the nineteenth century, in assigning their origins.

Professor Sidney Kasfir is Professor Emerita in the Art History Department of Emory University, specialising in the 19th and 20th century art of the Benue region of Nigeria as well as postcolonial art in Uganda. She has carried out extensive field research in these countries as well as in Kenya and Tanzania, is the author of two books and co-author and co-editor of three more, the most recent of which are Central Nigeria Unmasked: the Arts of the Benue River Valley with Richard Fardon, Marla Berns, John Picton and others (2011) and African Art and Agency in the Workshop with Till Forster (2013). Her current project is a study of early collecting in Nigeria under Indirect Rule, carried out by colonial officers for the Pitt Rivers and British Museums.

Dr Margaret Garlake (Independent scholar) From ‘primitive’ to ‘tribal’: William Fagg and the Post-War Culture of Modernity.

From ‘primitive to tribal’: William Fagg and the postwar culture of modernity For some years from the late 1940s William Fagg was an active member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts which he used as a platform from which to spread knowledge of African art. The ICA, funded by the Arts Council, itself the cultural arm of the Welfare State, contributed to the postwar culture of modernity - welfare, health, education, planning and reconstruction. This coincided both with the introduction of the notion of the Commonwealth to replace the Empire, just as its constituent territories

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml embarked on their quests for independence and the beginning of unpopular, widespread immigration from those countries. Fagg’s articulation of the distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’ art took place within this wider context where it was a small but potent signifier of a slow but hugely significant change of attitude towards formerly dependent countries.

Margaret Garlake studied archaeological conservation at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, 1959-62. She worked as an archaeologist/ conservator in Tanzania, Southern Rhodesia and Nigeria, 1962-73 and for Southwark Archaeological Excavation Committee, London, 1973-8. Between 1978 and 1987 she was a student at The Courtauld Institute of Art, gaining a BA and a Ph.D. She was an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute 1989-1999 and a visiting lecturer in 2003. From 2001 to 2004 she was editor of the Sculpture Journal and is now Chair of its Editorial Board.

Her publications include New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998, Peter Lanyon, London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1998, The Drawings of Peter Lanyon, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, Lund Humphries, 2006, (edited) Artists and Patrons in Post-war Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2001, The British Council at São Paulo, London: British Council, 1991, various essays and numerous exhibition reviews.

Lisa Maddigan Newby (UEA) ‘Not Always Talking the Same Language,' William Fagg and the ICA in Post-War London.

From William Fagg’s earliest collaborations with the Institute of Contemporary Art it became clear that they were 'not always talking the same language', as ICA Director Dorothy Morland wrote to him in 1953. This paper considers how Fagg's contributions to the exhibitions 40,000 Years of Modern Art (1948), Wonder and Horror of the Human Head (1953), and Lost Wax (1957) were interpreted in an institution advocating artistic experimentation. Maddigan Newby will show that there was a diversity of approaches operating alongside each other when ICA members debated the possibilities of working between art and anthropology in this period. In turn, this suggests a more complex engagement with the objects Fagg selected for ICA exhibitions than the dominant narrative of primitivism in art history has allowed. How can this help to position Fagg’s approach to objects? And how did this test the limits of the ICA’s multidisciplinary aspirations?

Lisa Maddigan Newby is an AHRC-funded Art History PhD candidate at UEA. Focussing on the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, her research examines the relevance of assemblage for the ways artists engaged with ethnographic collections in postwar Britain (1947-87). She has a BA in Art History from the University of Sussex and an MSc in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography from the University of Oxford. She has worked as a curator for the World Art Collections at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery and as a project manager for artist-led galleries and studios, focussing on site-specific and interdisciplinary projects.

Professor Elizabeth Harney (University of Toronto) Tribal and Post-Tribal: New Talk of a Canon in Modern and Contemporary African Arts.

How can a scholar of modern and contemporary African arts address the legacy of William Fagg? On one hand, he represents the very canonical traditions against which much of my research and writing has pushed – the connoisseur’s focus on form and style, the interest in identifying master hands, the inattention to the historical realities of modernity in Africa, the launch of the ‘tribal’ trope. On the other, his meticulously detailed scholarship, desire to legitimize Africa’s cultural practices in the eyes of the art establishment, and debunking of the anonymity myth, are not to be dismissed lightly. His scholarship was both of his time and, perhaps, prescient.

With the current writing of new forms of ‘world art’ history, we have yet again a tousle over the historicity of artistic practice. Increasingly scholars and curators position the ‘global contemporary art world’ as heir to an always-already set of cosmopolitan modernities. Re-reading Fagg’s canonical texts, many of which emerged within and against the backdrop of these cosmopolitan modernities, in Africa and in London, may yield useful findings. This paper will grapple with the contradictory legacies of Fagg’s scholarship to the current attempts to identify a postcolonial modern (or contemporary) canon of and

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml market for artistic practices in Africa.

Elizabeth Harney is an art historian and curator in the Department of Art, University of Toronto, teaching modern and contemporary African and diasporic arts. Harney is the author of In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995 (Duke 2004) and Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora (Philip Wilson/Smithsonian Institution: 2003), and co-editor of Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (5 Continents Press, 2007). Harney has published in Art Journal, African Arts, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Art Bulletin, Third Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Oxford Art Journal. She was the first curator of contemporary arts at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian (1999-2003). As a Commonwealth Scholar, Harney received her doctorate from the University of London. She has two books in progress, Retromodernism, Africa, and the Time of the Contemporary and Prismatic Scatterings: Global Modernists in post-war Europe.

Jonathan Benthall is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He was Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 1974 and 2000, and Founder Editor of Anthropology Today – also Editor of The Best of 'Anthropology Today' (2002). Before joining the RAI he was Secretary of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1971–73) and published Science and Technology in Art Today in 1972. Currently his research interests focus on religion and humanitarianism, with special reference to Islam, and he reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement

Kerryn Greenberg is Curator (International Art) at Tate Modern. She leads Tate’s Africa Acquisitions Committee and is responsible for formulating Tate’s strategy in the region. She has curated major exhibitions of key contemporary artists including Marlene Dumas, Meschac Gaba, Francis Alÿs and John Baldessari. At Tate Modern she has also organised large-scale survey exhibitions of Joan Miró, Mark Rothko and Juan Muñoz and curated several solo and group exhibitions including emerging artists such as Kader Attia, Sammy Baloji, Nicholas Hlobo, Michael MacGarry and Adolphus Opara. She has curated numerous displays including artists like William Kentridge, Santu Mofokeng, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré and Guy Tillim. She regularly publishes and lectures on contemporary art. Born and raised in South Africa, Kerryn has a Master of Arts Degree in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, New York.

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The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml